Libertarian Commentary on the News #12-47C: Election night blues

It is over – maybe: the counts and recounts and lawsuits are still to come. But to put it crudely, once again, this nation (what is left of it) screwed the pooch. Doesn’t matter exactly HOW, but we did.

Liberty Quotes (liberty.quotes@centre.telemanage.ca) tonight had two worthy quotes for an election day in which we once again have suffered the deadly results of democracy.

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams

The republic has been dead for a long time; now the pitiful excuse for human government called democracy has (at minimum) sliced its wrists. Democracy is the idea that anything and everything is subject to majority vote, from the laws of gravity to morality. It fails. Sadly, if Romney does take the popular vote, the “solution” for this democratic failure in the eyes of many will be to make it “more” democratic by ending the Electoral College.

For those who chide those who vote, I commend this wonderful analysis by Lysander Spooner:

“In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former.

His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot — which is a mere substitute for a bullet — because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.”
– Lysander Spooner

I have long contended that voting is a matter of self-defense, whether we are talking about voting for persons, or on issues. It may not be a very good self-defense, for we may be too squeamish to implement truly effective self-defense, or too stupid, or simply have lost all other alternatives. But as expected, it has again failed.

The fifty states of this formerly United States have shown themselves locked into a suicide pact. A minority of states (20 of the 50, plus that hateful little enclave of federal privilege, DC) have (through the bizarre workings of “democracy”) rammed a hateful “messiah” down the throats of the other thirty, to say nothing of the fact that the winner is actually supported by less than 1 in 6 Americans. If people really want a federal union with democracy, it would be one-state, one-vote.

Let me make it clear: Romney could not have stemmed the tides of destruction sweeping down on this once-great nation any more than Albert could have stopped the tides on that Danelaw beach. But even his hypocritical, self-serving, waffling statist-lite administration would be preferable to the ideologue, arrogant, hyper-nanny state that the next four years will bring (barring rebellion, rapid-onset catastrophic collapse, or alien liberation) under the enlightened, Augustan, benevolent rule of the revived First Citizen and “messiah.”

The deepening roots of more and more blatant socialism are sure to create an ever more frequent, ever more harsh, series of incidents of police abuse and brutality, judicial despotism, bureaucratic tyranny, and the stripping away of more and more rights of more and more people will accelerate.

There is much more to say, but not now – I’ll have plenty of time in the dwindling number of days before this column and this site are closed down or converted into something like a zombie repeating the very words of the creature’s killer.

About TPOL-Nathan

Nathan Barton is a christian, self-governor (free-market anarchist), husband, father, professional engineer, Engineer army officer, private businessman, and writer, teacher, and preacher. He works and lives mostly in four western states, and is Southern by heritage and Westerner by birth, upbringing, and choice.